Killer of Men Read Free

the Persian Empire, brother to Artaphernes.
    Draco – Wheelwright and wagon builder of Plataea, a leading man of the town.
    Empedocles – A priest of Hephaestus, the Smith God.
    Epaphroditos – A warrior, an aristocrat of Lesbos.
    Eualcidas – A Hero. Eualcidas is typical of a class of aristocratic men – professional warriors, adventurers, occasionally pirates or merchants by turns. From Euboeoa.
    Heraclitus – circa 535 – 475 BC. One of the ancient world’s most famous philosophers. Born to aristocratic family, he chose philosophy over political power. Perhaps most famous for his statement about time, ‘You cannot step twice into the same river’. His belief that ‘strife is justice’ and other similar sayings which you’ll find scattered through these pages made him a favorite with Nietzche. His works, mostly now lost, probably established the later philosophy of Stoicism.
    Herakleides – An Aeolian, a Greek of Asia Minor. With his brothers Nestor and Orestes, he becomes a retainer – a warrior – in service to Arimnestos. It is easy, when looking at the birth of Greek democracy, to see the whole form of modern government firmly established – but at the time of this book, democracy was less than skin deep and most armies were formed of semi-feudal war bands following an aristocrat.
    Heraklides – Aristides’s helmsman, a lower class Athenian who has made a name for himself in war.
    Hermogenes – Son of Bion, Arimnestos’s slave.
    Hesiod – A great poet (or a great tradition of poetry) from Boeotia in Greece, Hesiod’s ‘Works and Days’ and ‘Theogony’ were widely read in the sixth century and remain fresh today – they are the chief source we have on Greek farming, and this book owes an enormous debt to them.
    Hippias – Last tyrant of Athens, overthrown around 510 BC (that is, just around the beginning of this book), Hippias escaped into exile and became a pensioner of Darius of Persia.
    Hipponax – 540 BC – c. 498 BC. A Greek poet and satirist, considered the inventor of parody. He is supposed to have said ‘There are two days when a woman is a pleasure: the day one marries her and the day one buries her’.
    Histiaeus – Tyrant of Miletus and ally of Darius of Persia, possible originator of the plan for the Ionian Revolt.
    Homer – Another great poet, roughly Hesiod’s contemporary (give or take fifty years!) and again, possibly more a poetic tradition than an individual man. Homer is reputed as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey , two great epic poems which, between them, largely defined what heroism and aristocratic good behavior should be in Greek society – and, you might say, to this very day.
    Kylix – A boy, slave of Hipponax.
    Miltiades – Tyrant of the Thracian Chersonese. His son, Cimon or Kimon, rose to be a great man in Athenian politics. Probably Miltiades was the author of the Athenian victory of Marathon, but Miltiades was a complex man, a pirate, a warlord, and a supporter of Athenian democracy.
    Penelope – Daughter of Chalkeotechnes, sister of Arimnestos.
    Sappho – A Greek poetess from the island of Lesbos, born sometime around 630 BC and died between 570 and 550 BC. Her father was probably Lord of Eressos. Widely considered the greatest lyric poet of Ancient Greece.
    Simonalkes – Head of the collateral branch of the Plataean Corvaxae, cousin to Arimnestos.
    Simonides – Another great lyric poet, he lived circa 556 BC – 468 BC, and his nephew, Bacchylides, was as famous as he. Perhaps best known for his epigrams, one of which is:
Ω ξεῖν’, ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτιτῇδε
κείμεθα, τοῖςκείνωνῥήμασι πειθόμενοι
Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
    Thales – circa 624 BC – c. 546 BC The first philosopher of the Greek tradition, whose writings were still current in Arimnestos’s time. Thales used geometry to solve problems